1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to information technology systems, and more particularly to a computer based system and method for strengthening a healthcare provider's quality program.
2. Description of Related Art
Healthcare has transformed over the past thirty years into a technologically advancing, safety critical industry with a declining sphere of influence over its own future because of a reputation for unstable quality. Many of health care's current struggles result from an environment where technology has repeatedly transformed the dynamics of patient care delivery while its efforts to control the new risks natural to that evolution have failed to keep pace. At the same time that technology has allowed health care to advance what it can do to improve the quality and longevity of life, it has introduced an environment where it is easier for preventable harm to touch the life of a patient. The design and operations of a provider's approaches to quality management, particularly safety management, play critical roles in just how well all the industry's technologies work to advance the success of its providers and service the public. Whether the industry's quality approaches can effectively manage the natural tension between innovation and safety determines the end-product of health care.
Managing quality in a fast paced environment where the demands on the workforce increase as a natural by-product of technological growth can be a challenge. The approach to quality in these environments is particularly important as its primary purpose is to maintain the reliability of a product or service in delivering on desired outcomes as the variables that challenge the ability to achieve those outcomes grow in number and complexity. It has become important to overcome the problems created by health care's current retrospective, reactive, and bureaucratic approaches that are costing the industry too much in terms of patient lives, money, resources, morale and the support of its public.
In its simplest form, quality is defined as how well a business does what it does. For health care's public, this is measured in patient perception of a provider's ability to deliver patient care in ways that offer optimal outcomes given the knowledge, science and evidence currently available. Much of that is measured in how well providers manage the patient care environment to promote optimal safety and deliver care consistent with currently known standards while keeping care patient-focused. The majority of the measures that feed patient perception fall into the categories of reliability, resilience, the skill to deliver care consistent with current evidence-based standards untouched by error and the ability to meet individualized patient needs. It is health care's ability to make patients feel well cared for and personally cared about.
Health care is estimated to have approximately 3000 standards that must currently be managed in order to promote safe and optimal environments for patients and workers. That number is growing every day as new science and experience introduce new knowledge while the dynamics of a technologically advancing environment continuously introduces new risks and shifts existing risks. The average hospital department has between 75 and 145 basic standards that translate into several hundreds of tasks that need to be managed in addition to the patient care and operational support activities that are also growing in number. For a typical one hundred bed hospital, this translates into the need to manage approximately 10,000 safety related activities annually in addition to the growing number of evidence-based standards that define clinically appropriate patient care and service-oriented activities directed at patient satisfaction. How all of these standards come together determines the odds of how great an experience a patient can have. In spite of millions (and probably billions) of dollars and too many man-hours to count, health care is struggling to keep pace with its own environment because it can't effectively manage all of these standards. Much of that struggle exists because its approaches to quality are too slow, too resource-intensive and deliver too little too late.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for strengthening a quality program of a healthcare provider. It is another object of the present invention to provide a system and method for managing quality initiatives for timely and effective improvement. It is another object of the present invention to provide a system and method for strengthening reliability, resilience, and workforce performance potential while reducing the costs associated with errors. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system and method for providing and updating a quality assurance monitoring tool that resembles a calendar having a pixel mapped format that allows for real time monitoring and action in a way that reduces the risk of an error making it all the way to a patient. These and other objects of the present invention will become evident to one skilled in the art after a review of this specification, claims, and the attached drawings.